Confessions of a wealthy immigrant: “model minority” is a myth

We were celebrating the Lunar New Year, practicing rituals, honoring ancestors, and eating dozens of dumplings. I watched in confusion and horror as the news broke in my family’s living room via Chinese satellite TV, struggling to pick up what was happening.

As the hours went by and we heard of reports of people being detained at the border, my mom fumed with her sisters and brothers. Like many immigrant families, we still have relatives abroad and make frequent trips to see them. She felt, on a visceral level, the injustice and inhumanity of being denied entry to your home after leaving to maintain family ties. I was proud of her for setting the tone, for being loud and furious and fighting against the instinct to keep our heads down and not talk about it. But inevitably at the end of a rant, she would turn the conversation to what she and the family should do to protect our money.

This moment of reaching for security through money sums up all of the conflicting and complicated feelings I have about being part of a wealthy immigrant family.

Here are the facts:

• I am a descendant of Chinese landlords, military clerks, and military officers.

• My grandfathers fought for the Kuomintang nationalist army and fled to Taiwan with their families when they lost the war in the late 1940s.

• My parents attended college in Taiwan and immigrated here as graduate students in 1977.

• They both got white-collar professional jobs in North Carolina.

• My mom has made most of our family’s wealth through her insurance business, and the vast majority of her customer base is other Chinese immigrants and their families.

Here’s how my family’s immigration story can be told with three different spins.

Here’s the “model minority” spin on my family’s story: My parents are the scrappy immigrants who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, came here legally, and played by the rules. They got their home in the suburbs with the two-car garage and sent their three kids to college. This is a story we will use to protect ourselves by being the “good” immigrants.

The “model minority” success story is used as a wedge to deny systemic economic and racial injustice, reinforcing myths of criminality in the “bad” undocumented immigrants and “laziness” in immigrants and black people. Because if families like mine could “succeed,” what’s holding back other immigrants and families of color?

And perversely, the more we use it, the more it hurts us. The “model minority” is an invention to reinforce white supremacy. It requires assimilation into a white supremacist society, which means we’ve had to deny or hide certain aspects of our culture and background.

There’s also the immigrant hustle version: My parents dealt with constant racism, worked multiple jobs to make a living, and bought our clothes at yard sales and Kmart. My mom battled her way into an industry dominated by white men to carve out a place for herself and to advocate for other Chinese immigrants. This is the story I use when I want to minimize the distance between me and my friends who also had immigrant parents but lived in one-bedroom apartments and barely saw their parents because they worked multiple shifts at a restaurant. This is the story I use to hide the role of class privilege in my life, that tries to flatten being an immigrant into a uniform experience of hardship and struggle.

Of course it was hard for my parents. But I’ve learned how to tell their story adding a class privilege X-ray to their journey.

My grandparents were landowners who fought against the communists. My parents came from class-privileged families in China who could afford to send them to college and abroad.

They immigrated legally after the Chinese Exclusion Act, a decades-long ban on Chinese immigrants, was repealed and during a time of more open immigration policy, to receive advanced degrees. They speak fluent English. Affirmative action made my mom’s professional breakthrough possible. They were able to buy a $300,000 four-bedroom home in 1993, when we were one of two East Asian families in a 99 percent white neighborhood. Black people had been redlined out of that same neighborhood, a racist practice when a bank disproportionately denies mortgages to people of color, especially black people.

None of this negates my parents’ struggle or the racism they experienced. But their class privilege served as a buffer and a safety net. They’re also not black in a violently anti-black society.

So I only have compassion for my mom when she starts to stress about money, even though she has more than enough. Money for her represents safety in a hostile climate. Money and class privilege got our family out of trouble in the past and made it possible to immigrate twice in two generations.

But I know the ICE raids and the Trump bans aren’t targeting my family. They are targeting the most vulnerable  —  poor and working-class immigrants of color without legal status. People who work hard but never reached the financial security our family has because of all the barriers stacked against them.

The stories we tell about immigrants are class stories. For progressives, immigrants represent the myth of the American dream, the oh-so-enticing lie that if you just work hard enough, you can climb the class ladder. For the right, immigrants are all poor (read: criminals) who are drains on the economy. Placed in this dichotomy, it’s easy to see why families like mine fight so hard to be the “good” immigrants.

But both narratives reinforce classism, the system that has created a world where you have to “earn” a right to be treated with basic dignity as a human being.

I share my family’s story with you to show that all immigrant families’ — indeed, all families’ — stories and histories are class stories. If we aren’t honest and clear about our class backgrounds, class stories can be used to divide and conquer, pushing people to compete against each other for individual security over the collective good.

Learning how to tell the truth about how our family is implicated in, benefits from, and resists violent systems of exploitation is an ongoing process. I have felt everything from guilt to anger to pride as I have learned more about our story, but as my mom and I talk about class, our shared values, and the world we want, we’ve realized we want a political system that protects our communities, not our wealth. Recognizing and challenging myths about immigration helps make the space for all of us to be in community with others. In the process, we’re able to more forcefully challenge the systemic injustices throughout our immigration and political system.

For us, that means using our wealth and class privilege to support local organizations led by people most impacted by xenophobic and racist immigration policies. Poor and working-class black and brown communities, especially Muslim and Latinx communities, are among those who have been on the front lines of fighting for immigrant justice. It’s time for people like my mom and me to stand behind them.

Here are my recommendations:

Iimay Ho is the executive director of Resource Generation, a national multiracial, membership-based organization of people ages 18 to 35 with access to wealth who are using their money, power, and resources to support social, economic, and racial justice. Prior to Resource Generation, she was the director of operations and finance at the Management Center and student leadership development manager at OCA —  Asian Pacific American Advocates.

Born and raised in North Carolina, Iimay was politicized through interning with Southerners on New Ground (SONG). She is currently on the board of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice.

Illustrations by Amanda Northrop.

Class privilege X-ray based on original illustration by Molly Hein for Classified: How to Stop Hiding Your Privilege and Use It for Social Change! by Karen Pittelman.

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